


Run On

by ordinarily (tofty)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-23
Updated: 2008-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/ordinarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is having a piss-poor day.  But when doesn't he?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run On

**Author's Note:**

> I wish the West Texas highway was a Möbius strip; I could ride it out forever when I feel my heart break.
> 
> \--"Source Decay," The Mountain Goats

Days like today, they're the bad ones, and it seems like they're all days like today, lately. He's sick and stuttering from lack of sleep. He's overdosing on caffeine and sugar and JD just to be able to get out of bed, which he has to do because they've got about fifteen minutes to get the hell out of this latest crappy motel in this latest crappy town, wherever the fuck they are, and get to the next motel in the next town, wherever the fuck that happens to be.

He's pulling on clothes with one hand and brushing his teeth with the other, and Sam, Sam's looking at him, just looking steady at him, constantly on the verge of saying something or maybe he is actually saying something that Dean isn't hearing and Sam's so hard to read lately that Dean can't tell if the thing he's about to say or is saying is (bad) scathing or (worse) sympathetic. Sam doesn't want to talk about himself, he wants to talk about Dean, wants to talk about things Dean can't talk about (not won't talk about, or doesn't want to talk about, even though both those things are also true, but not as true as the words burning, acid at the back of his throat choking him so that he can hardly breathe, and he can't swallow them down or wash them down and he can't cough them up, they just stick there, always there) and Sam, who means well but seems more awkward teenager than adult when he's trying to be helpful and is steeped in secrets of his own, can't help him with anyway.

The flashbacks are always close now, he's lousy with nightmares, whether his eyes are open or closed they're crawling over and into him until he can't believe that no one else but him can hear the screams or smell the sulfur, forty years of it forty years all around him again without warning. Seriously he does know that he's not in Hell still, knows it like the handprint on his shoulder or the cool press of Anna's lips against his or the feel of Sam's bicep pressed against his arm as they load their bags into the trunk of the Impala. He knows it, but on days like today he isn't feeling it, feels instead that with every step he takes the ground might fall away, leaving him falling through space down into this past summer, as if Hell were actually down, as if he were still eight years old and completely convinced that Bobby's basement was Hell, yawning open underneath him whenever they swung by his place. Yeah. He guesses, though, that the ground sort of fell away a while ago, not sure how he's still standing sometimes.

On days like today he turns the keys in at the front desk and doesn't remember for a hundred miles or so that he didn't even crack a smile at the pretty desk clerk, and he's given his own keys to Sam because his hands are shaking too much for him to feel right driving. Sam pulls the car up outside the lobby and he slumps into the shotgun seat, chilly leather slowly warming against his back as they pull out onto the road. He fidgets with the ashtray, accordions the map (in-out-in-out) until Sam threatens to stop the car and shove it up his ass, and the trip's long enough, West Texas to Minnesota, that he eventually starts to breathe again.

The open roads spool out in front of him, single-sided and endless like the Möbius strip bracelet he made for Sam when he was sixteen (and smoking a lot of pot and into Escher on account of that), and they're passing, over and over, the same towns and restaurants and gas stations, and it maybe should be making him feel claustrophobic, but instead he's expanding, lightheaded with relief, and he lets himself be comforted by the Impala's rumbling sweaty roar and its humid gymlocker smell, and there haven't been any dreams in the Impala since the dreamroot last year, and he can sleep here and so he does, and he'll wake up four hours later with Sam's voice low in his ears. He'll think, then, that even on a day like today, he might be okay as long as he can keep moving.


End file.
